Lady Godiva and Me is back in print

The naked lady rides again, with an accompanying cast of earls, churls, ranting preachers, shop girls migrants, factory workers skinheads and schoolboys.

A lightly revised second edition, available from Lulu, and from the shop at www.liamguilar.com

Vortigern part two: Gildas, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

This is the second of three posts tracking how a story involving a ‘Vortigern’, which runs clearly from Gildas, to Bede to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, will become a story about Vortigern, which can be traced from the Historia Britonnum to its elaboration under Geoffrey of Monmouth and from him to Laȝamon.

In what becomes the ‘English’ version of the story, the events remain the same: three ship loads of Germanic warriors are invited to Britain and then turn on their employers. But there are important shifts in emphasis across these three texts. 

As in all Medieval sources, genre, purpose and context have a significant impact on the information and as in so many early medieval sources, they give the frustrating sense that we are reading eye-witnesses to important events who could have told us what we want to know but who, instead, are obsessed with telling us about their neighbours’ hats.  

Gildas (A very brief introduction)

The De Excidio Britannia of Gildas is a notoriously difficult text to use as an historical source. When it was written and where it was written and how reliable it is are ‘sources of scholarly contention’.   

‘Gildas’, is the only surviving insular source for the fifth century but was probably written in the first half of the sixth. Imagine trying to reconstruct the history of British settlement in Australia from one sermon delivered a hundred years after it happened, ritten by a radical evangelical who saw history in terms of divine reward and punishment. 

On the other hand, Gildas was obviously educated, part of a literary culture, and writing about events which may have occurred within three generations, which is usually considered to be the reliable span of oral history. So, tread carefully, but don’t write him off. 

He is writing an open letter to castigate his contemporary Britons for their sinful ways. The historical section at the start shows that their failures in history are a direct result of their turning away from God. The English are the instruments of God’s punishment and a sign of his disfavour. However, at the time of writing, although the English have taken much of the island. If the Britons would only repent, there is still time to get rid of them. 

You can read a translation here: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/gildas-full.asp

Or if you wish, the Latin is here, with a facing translation: http://vortigernstudies.org.uk/arthist/vortigernquotesgil.htm

The relevant text is in Part one, Chapters 22 and 23. For anyone new to early medieval texts, the fact that the translations and the texts vary, even to the extent ‘Vortigern’ is named or identified, is normal. For convenience, I’m going to quote from the second of the above links.

Vortigern in Gildas.

Abandoned by the Romans, and incapable of defending themselves. A council is held, to deliberate what means ought to be determined upon, as the best and safest to repel such fatal and frequent irruptions and plunderings…

Gildas continues, At that time all the members of the assembly along with the arrogant tyrant are blinded;such is the protection they find for their country (it was, in fact, its destruction) that those wild Saxons, of accursed name, hated by God and men, should be admitted into the island, like wolves into folds, in order to repel the northern nations.

For Gildas, the decision is not simply in keeping with the well-known, late Imperial habit of recruiting tribal allies, although his vocabulary later implies he knew about that practice. For Gildas, it’s a disaster: Nothing more hurtful, certainly, nothing more bitter happened to the island than this.  

A great deal of ink has been spilt discussing if ‘Superbus Tryannus’ (arrogant tyrant in the quote above) is a title, an insult, a nasty pun, a name or any combination of these. Some texts and translations give both the phrase and the name. Some just the phrase. You can take your pick, or mix and match, and argue your case. Later traditions would treat it as a personal name and elevate Vortigern to the status of King. 

But three things are worth noting. 

In Gildas’s version the decision to invite the three ships of Saxon mercenaries is not an individual’s, but taken by a council. 

The Saxons are presented as already known to be worse than the Picts and Scots… ‘when absent they feared [the Saxons] worse than death’ they are hated of ‘God and men’.  

The decision to invite them is a divinely sanctioned disaster. The implication is that if the Britons had turned to God, they would not have needed to invite the wolves into their home. What utter depth of darkness of soul. What hopeless and cruel darkness of mind. 

Vortigern in Bede

By the eighth century, when Bede writes his version of the coming of the English, the writer’s context has changed.  The 'English' are now not only dominant in the country, but for Bede, they are God’s chosen people. They are still His instrument of punishment for the Britons, but they are no longer feared seaborne raiders, hated by God and men, who sacrificed a percentage of their captives to ensure a safe journey home. 

Although the story is basically the same, the emphasis has also shifted. Bede is writing 3 centuries after the facts and understanding Gildas in the light of his own times. His history is dominated by great individuals: popes, saints, warrior kings, operating without or without God’s favour. His own political landscape is dominated by kings, kingdoms and their wars.

So Vortigern is no longer just a name, but a King, and it is his decision to call in the Saxons: ‘For they [the Britons] consulted how they might obtain help to avoid or repel the frequent fierce attacks of their neighbours, and all agreed with the advice of their King, Vortigern, to call on the assistance of the Saxon peoples across the sea’ [my Italics]. 

Bede repeats this in his next chapter: they came ‘at the invitation of King Vortigern’. Bede also records that the first chieftains were brothers called Hengist and Horsa.

He says nothing more about Vortigern or the brothers but that’s not surprising. From the arrival of the three ships which he dates around 449 to the arrival of the Augustine Mission in 596, he records nothing about the late fifth or most of the sixth century except a brief reference to a British victory at Mount Badon.  

Vortigern in the ASC

Not surprisingly, for the writer of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the English are neither ‘hated of God and men’ nor God’s chosen people/instrument of His punishment for the sinful Britons, nor limited to three hundred years in their rule of the Island. Vortigern is neither evil nor stupid, simply the remembered agent of the Anglo-Saxon arrival. 

The ASC mentions Vortigern in only two entries; 449 and 455. The first names him as King of the Britons, and responsible for the invitation. The second, six years later, (there are no intervening entries) records laconically that he fought against Hengest and Horsa; Horsa was killed and after that Hengist became King with his son. There is no mention of what happens to Vortigern. 

The genre of these three texts didn’t provide the opportunity for their writers to go into the who, why, how, of biography, even if the purpose behind them made that desirable, which it obviously didn’t. However, having made him into such a pivotal figure, it’s hardly surprising that stories would develop to answer those ‘biographical’ questions: who was this ‘Vortigern’? Why did he do that? What kind of man was he? What happened to him?  

In the next post, Vortigern becomes a character with a biography.  

(One thing to keep in mind, which I’ll return to later, is that as the stories develop across time the initial scale of the events becomes forgotten.) 

The Story of Vortigern

-->

I’m not interested in whether or not Vortigern was an historical figure. I am interested in his role in ‘The Legendary History’ or ‘The Matter of Britain’, in particular the version of his story told by Laȝamon and how that story had developed. 

Laȝamon's version, written sometime after 1155, is the earliest English version of what resembles a full life. The brief appearance of Vortigern’s name in two entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has been developed into a complicated narrative which leads to the conception of Arthur:  Vortigern first seizes power, employs Hengist but is out-maneuvered by him, he marries Hengist’s daughter, fights his own sons and brings Merlin into the Legendary History. 

Vortigern’s story seems to belong to three traditions which might be separated purely for convenience. I'm particularly interested in the story before Geoffrey (1 and 2 below).  

1)   Gildas > Bede> Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

2)   Historia Brittonum (Nennius) / 2a  [The Pillar of Eliseg] 

3)   Geoffrey of Monmouth>Wace>Laȝamon

  

1 is the ‘historical’ Vortigern. From a possible mistranslation/misreading of Gildas to the brief Chronicle entries for 449 and 455.  

2 is ‘legendary’ and British.  This version is not only ‘fuller’ but different to 1 in a number of significant ways. The inscription on the pillar of Eliseg seems to commemorate Vortigern, but as Higham (2002, p. 167) writes : it treats him ‘with great honour…as a figure of extraordinary repute to whom the current generation look back with proper reverence'. As such it may be the only positive treatment of Vortigern in any of the sources. 

Have I missed any sources from the period before Geoffrey?
(A separate post on each of the traditions to follow).
Update: It's been pointed out that I've left out William of Malmesbury. My thanks.

A revised 'complete' Sappho is available...

Jo Balmer discusses her new, updated translations of Sappho.

The new Bloodaxe edition has been updated to include fragments discovered since the first edition.

https://thepathsofsurvival.wordpress.com/2018/08/08/revisiting-sappho/

Alan Garner Conclusion

The original  attempt to explain why I admire Alan Garner's writing was split over four blog posts. Although it's a work in progress, now it’s hopefully integrated into something more coherent here: Alan Garner.  (Clicking on the link will take you to the complete version).  I’ve  changed the ending so it’s no longer a bad-tempered swipe at current ways of teaching literature but an attempt to explain why the later books are so impressive.  

Talking about the household Gods is always difficult. What I think is still missing from both attempts is how entertaining the books are. The story teller is not worth his place by the fire, in the hall or at the kitchen table, if he or she cannot juggle the multiple requirements of his role, and not the least of these is to entertain the audience. 

Alan Garner 4, Learning how to read, the value of reading.

WARNING: OPINIONATING IN PROGRESS

Things I learnt.

Should you rush off now and read Alan Garner?

No, he’s my author, find your own.

As I wrote 3 posts ago, the book that shakes your world, and goes on doing so, may put

your best friend to sleep. It’s a valuable lesson. Why a thin book about three teenagers and a set of plates should have been so disturbing, and remain so decades later, after repeated re-readings, is probably unanswerable.  

I think there is an objective argument to be made for the quality of his prose and his stature as a stylist. I doubt I would have ‘understood’ Heaney’s ‘Do not waver into Language/ Do not Waver in it’ if it weren’t for Garner’s books. I don’t think I would have been so receptive to Basil Bunting or Geoffrey Hill without him either and I don’t see those two as in anyway superior. I admire the man’s integrity, his willingness to hold his line, to follow the grain in the wood to where it took him. I am grateful for the way he never patronised me as his reader.  All of which I suspect goes for Bunting and Hill as well.

In the Smoke that Thunders, Garner claims to have been offered two absolute pieces of advice by his Grandfather: If someone else can do the job better, let them; Take as long as the job needs.

They seem true though difficult to put in practice.

Although initially heading towards a life of classical scholarship, he makes the point in his fiction and in his other writing that Greek rationality and Logic are not the only path to understanding. They are one way, and they are essential in some cases, but at other times stories, myths, songs, the poetry inherent in the texture of language itself, the interaction of story and landscape, are powerful tools for a different kind of understanding, a different, not lesser, way of thinking. The work he did preparing Strandloper may have crystalized this. As long as the myth or the story isn’t trivialised, or made redundant by a desire to please the audience at all costs, the myth, poem and story are ways of thinking through and in language. ‘Through’ here means both ‘by means of’ and ‘by way of travelling through’.  

But for this to work, there’s an element of necessary surrender on the part of the reader. An initial humility and a willingness to pay attention which are both unfashionable. And sadly, it’s the opposite to the way reading is taught in most literary programs. There are pragmatic reasons for including books in schools. They are ways of developing the ability to read, write and think in language. But how could you teach the real power and pleasure of reading, if you start by teaching reluctant readers to resist?  

The lie that underwrites 'critical literacy', that somehow it empowers readers and protects them from the invidious ideological work of the text, (never the poem, the play or the novel, always the text, as though there was no important difference between The Waste Land and a Macdonald’s advert), is a complete contradiction not only of common sense but of the way people who love and value books, read. It’s a bunker mentality in which critic and student sit in their fox hole sniping at any text that approaches them, having decided in advance what is important and what is acceptable based on their preferred version of the world, or, in the case of students, their teacher or lecturer’s preferred version. 

Critical literacy, as often taught and practised, is the arrogant victory of the mindless and unthinking who are too scared to risk the discovery that the world is much more complicated (and interesting) than their own ghetto mentality. It destroys the way story and poem work for reasons based on a ludicrous misunderstanding of the way story and poem work.  As a way of reading it is no more admirable or intelligent than the mindless use of badly written books to pass the time and it doesn’t even offer the pleasure of the latter.     

The new national Australian Senior English Literature syllabus makes the same mistake. Let us discuss ‘representations’, let us talk about the way ‘Aesthetic’ features ‘position readers’.  There is no sense that literature is an art form. Or that ignorance of the history of that art form, a contested and infinitely debatable list of practitioners and products, renders any statement about the value or quality of a work of art instantly irrelevant.  It is a little more than an institutionalised, theoretically justified version of the currently fashionable cult of ignorance. In an academic context, it should be unforgiveable.

The new syllabus compounds this by assessing literary knowledge through an ‘unseen exam’ in which students are expected to ‘know’ a book well enough to answer previously unseen questions without having the book present. It should be obvious to anyone that this is a self defeating way of assessing any kind of genuine response to literature. It doesn’t even assess students' memory of the book; it assesses their memory of their teachers’ best guess at what the topics are going to be. And so another generation of student readers will have the oxygen supply cut off to their brains.

Whether literary education has any value in regard to understanding how books works is still a moot point. Which is why there must always be free public libraries. There are always books waiting to be read. Readers will find their way to them, regardless of the way literature is used or abused in educational institutions. Someone is always going to be saying,..’read this’. Literary education is well on its way to becoming redundant and irrelevant and few will mourn its eventual passing.

What did I learn from Alan Garner?

Do not waver into Language

Do not waver in it.

And

Treasure the texts that rattle your world, not the ones that lull you to sleep by telling you what you already knew or wanted to hear.

Alan Garner 3 Thursbitch and Boneland

Phase three:

Sui Generis.

Thursbitch 2003 and Boneland2012. 

Because this is about Garner, I am allowed one apparently unbelievable story.

It happened like this. I read The Voice that Thunders, the collection of Garner’s essays and lectures, in the common room in Golant Youth hostel while I was working there as an assistant warden in 1984. It had been left by a passing hosteller on the book shelf. I have a visceral memory of reading the essay Inner time, which begins with the filming of The Owl Service. 

I would swear to this in a court of law. 

The Voice that Thunders was not published until 1997.

My initial failure to read Strandloper rankled. But then came Thursbitch. The critical part of my brain, before it shut up and left me to the experience of reading, could see the familiar aspects of the novel. Patterns, the past folding into the present, time swirling in complicated eddies around a specific place. Two stories, set in different times, the older story written in mostly untagged dialogue in a bleak dialect. Relationships are awkward: one of the modern characters is slowly dying. And there was that familiar sense of perception being bent, of the sparse carefully placed words opening up areas that had been dusty or unvisited.

Thursbitch made me want to write silly things: ‘Garner is the last surviving British Modernist’. ‘If he weren’t  labelled a writer for young adults he’d be acclaimed as one of the best writers of English in the twentieth century’ and so on….fortunately I was too busy enjoying the book to embarrass myself. 

What the books had been suggesting since the Owl Service was ‘then is now’…but unlike Bunting’s ‘the star you steer by is gone’, the books suggested not only is the past still present, but the stories reach all the way back to the preverbal, pre-human ancestor. 

The early books had divorced the fantasy world from reality, there were portals or spells to get you through. Garner’s excavations since The Owl Service had brought to the surface the important fact that dreams are part of the heft of the world, that there is more to life than the purely rational chronological grind. A mind trained in modern rational discourse can accept the mythic and see its value.  And in his most recent novel, Boneland, he put this idea front and centre. 

Boneland is supposedly the final part of the Weirdstone trilogy. But apart from a character called Colin who has lost his sister, it is light years beyond the ending of The Moon of Gomrath. It’s difficult to imagine any child reading the first two books and then going straight to Boneland, though I hope some will. The distance between the books marks the journey Garner and his readers have made. In this case, the pattern has been quarried right back to that preverbal ancestor, who finally makes his appearance, and it’s hard to believe anyone else could have made such a character convincing. 

As an experience, I think Boneland, like Thursbitch, is moving and disturbing. Whether it works as a sequel to the first two books is a moot point and depends on what you expect from a ‘sequel’. Whether it creates such a compelling sense of mystery and impending doom that the ending seems anticlimactic is up to the individual reader. But no reader familiar with Garner’s work could have expected the book  to tie up all the narrative threads neatly, and end with the words…’and they lived happily ever after’.